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Cumming BP., Jesacher A., Booth MJ., Wilson T., Gu M.

We present the use of a liquid crystal spatial light modulator to correct for the refractive-index mismatch induced spherical aberration in a high refractive-index lithium niobate crystal when a low repetition rate amplified laser is used for the direct fabrication of three-dimensional micro-structures. By correcting the aberration based on experimentally determined values, we show that the size of written structures decreases dramatically, which allows the fabrication of high quality micro-structures such as three-dimensional photonic crystals. We demonstrate that, through the use of adaptive optics, the fabrication depth and the stopgap strength in the corresponding photonic crystals are increased by a factor of two to three.